City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

“He hurt me, Mishra. The man hurt me.”

  She sits up. “Nokov? Sir? How did you…How did you find me? I didn’t say your name.”

  “I remembered where you once called me,” says his voice. “I remembered. I remembered where it was. I’m getting stronger, Mishra. I can go to places uninvited, if I’ve been there before. But still, he…Still, despite this, he hurt me, Mishra.”

  “Who do you mean, sir? The dauvkind?” She knew that the operation in Ghaladesh had gone wildly south. The decimation of Komayd’s house was all over the news. She’d received one message from Nokov—a letter, made of black paper, which mysteriously manifested itself in her dresser drawer the morning after—saying to distribute a sketch of the dauvkind to all Ministry sources, which she’d done. But she hadn’t seen Nokov himself—and she certainly didn’t know he’d been hurt.

  Or even been capable of being hurt, really. That’s disturbing.

  There’s a grunt to her right. Then something in the shadows…shifts.

  And she sees him. Or, perhaps, he allows her to see him.

  When she first saw him that day nine years ago, when he left her the letter asking if she would join him, he looked like an ordinary Continental boy—though his eyes had been a little dark, as if difficult to see, and he’d been able to slip in and out of shadows unusually well. Yet as time went by and their mission progressed, he changed.

  Nokov stares down at her. He’s still a young man, certainly, appearing to be not yet twenty, but his bearing and his eyes have changed, faint stars flickering in endless darkness, capable of seeing…more.

  He’s stronger now. A prince arrayed in his vestments of power.

  Yet then he holds up his hand, and she sees his fingers are bruised and swollen.

  “He hurt me,” says Nokov. “How is this possible? How could he have done this? Do you know?”

  “I…No. I didn’t know that you could be hurt.”

  “I can’t! I’m stronger than any of my siblings now!” His voice comes from all around her, as if all the shadows are vibrating at once. “I know that, you and I both know that. If I could just find them I’d…I’d…” He struggles for a moment, and then says, “It’s not fair, damn it. It’s not fair! I shouldn’t…I shouldn’t be able to be hurt anymore. Not anymore.” He looks at her, troubled. “How strong do I have to be to stop them from hurting me?”

  Her mouth opens. Though she finds it hard to believe, she suspects he’s looking to her for comfort. But what’s odder still is that there’s an unspoken again in that comment, as if he’s suffered once and has since been running from it.

  “Are you all right, sir?” she asks him.

  He lowers his hand. His face hardens. “No. I am not. A mortal man, who can physically hurt me? That makes it much harder for me to personally intervene! Because wherever I approach, he could be there. And now he knows what he can do to me. As do my siblings, I have no doubt.” He shakes his head. “This is bad, Mishra, this is very bad.”

  “How did he escape, sir?” asks Mishra.

  “He…Well. I accidentally pulled him into my domain.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “It is…quite difficult to put this in simple terms,” says Nokov. “There is a place where I am purely me. In that place, I touch every shadow, every bit of darkness. I pulled him into this place, and he…I think he slipped through another shadow. Entered and promptly exited.” Nokov narrows his eyes. “I think. Which might have killed him.”

  “Why would it kill him, sir?”

  “Because that place was made for me,” says Nokov. “It is where I am I. Mortals were not meant to be there, even for one second. But this mortal is…concerning. He might have survived. He might have.”

  “Where would the shadow have exited, sir?”

  Nokov makes a face as if trying to balance a complicated budget in his head. “I suspect it would be…to here. To Ahanashtan. The place I visit the most. They are like doors….And I’ve left more doors open around Ahanashtan than any other place.”

  Mishra slowly exhales. “Ahanashtan is where we have the most resources. But there are also lots of exits. We’ll watch the train station, and the docks—as much as we can. Which might not be enough, sir.”

  Nokov is silent for a long while.

  “But…But what do we do besides that, sir?” asks Mishra.

  Nokov says, “Did you know, Mishra, that you were my first?”

  “The first what, sir?”

  “The first mortal that…that I showed myself to. That I approached and spoke to. I’d been watching you before then, I thought you might help me. But I wasn’t sure. Yet I chose to show myself to you anyway.”

  “I didn’t know, sir.”

  “I have never asked you this—you have always done what I asked, and you have every right to refuse to answer—but…why did you join with me? Why did you say yes that first time, so many years ago?”

  “I…I’m not sure, sir.” She thinks about it. “I suppose that when I first said your name, it was to see if what you were offering could possibly be real. And you came, and it was real. And we talked, but…But when I saw you, you…reminded me of someone.”

  “I did?” he says, surprised.

  “Yes.” She bows her head. “My brother, Sanjay. He was killed in Voortyashtan.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know you’re not the same age, sir, but you both look sort of the same age, and…Well. You both…” She struggles to search for the term. “You both believed. In something. Anything. Which, at the time, I couldn’t.”

  “I see,” says Nokov quietly.

  “Might I ask, ah, why you asked, sir?”

  “It’s complicated. Have you ever heard of a seneschal, Mishra?”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “A seneschal. It was something the old Divinities used to do. A mortal who bears the miracles and blessings of a Divinity, and speaks and acts for them. A representative or a champion, in a way. It was considered a tremendous honor among the old Continentals. But it comes at a price. A seneschal bears the miracles of a Divinity—but a miracle is a piece of that Divinity. To be a seneschal is to consume and be merged with a god—and that is no small thing.”

  “What are you saying, sir?”

  He looks at her, his eyes glimmering. “I am saying,” he says, “that if you were to become my seneschal, Mishra, you might not be you anymore. You would be something new. And I am not quite a Divinity yet. I am close to it. With each victory we have, I grow closer. But I know that I am not yet there. So I do not know how this exchange could go.”

  “I…I see, sir.”

  He thinks for a while, then sighs. “I will not ask this of you, not yet. But we face hard choices ahead, Mishra.” He stands. “Notify me the moment you know anything.”

  “Yes, sir. We will listen carefully for any whisper of the dauvkind.”

  “Good.” He steps farther back into the shadows. “Sleep well, Mishra.” He flickers, as if a nearby candle flame is being buffeted by a breeze. Then he’s gone. The darkness disappears with him, soft moonlight returns, and Mishra stares around at her empty apartments.

  In the dark, Sigrud dreams.

  He dreams of a memory, of things as they once were.

  His father, small and weary, waiting in a dark hallway as Sigrud walks out of a door. Torchlight quakes on the stone walls. The air is moist and cold.

  His father smiles at him, looking at something in his arms. Sigrud looks down. He holds an infant girl in his arms: Signe, mere minutes old.

  “Look at you,” says his father to the child. Then, to Sigrud: “And look at you.”

  Sigrud frowns at the look in his father’s eyes. “You don’t look happy.”

  His father smiles. “I am happy. But I am also not happy.”

  “Why? Why are you sad?”

  “I’m not sad, Sigrud. You will learn many beautiful things about life now. But also many sad ones.”

  “Like what?”

&nb
sp; “Well, to start with…” He looks down at his granddaughter, still sleeping, still beautiful. “Now that she is in this world, your life will never truly be your own.”

  Sigrud looks down at Signe, this tiny, perfect, frowning thing.

  The infant opens her mouth. A scream comes out, loud and pained, an adult scream of genuine terror.

  The scream continues, but the scene changes. He’s in Voortyashtan, in Fort Thinadeshi, screaming madly, one hand around the throat of a Saypuri soldier, the other thrusting his knife up into her belly again and again and again, slashing her open until her intestines begin spilling out….

  Her eyes are wide as they stare up into his. Her face, though blood-spattered and pale, is smooth and soft—the face of a girl hardly older than eighteen.

  She was a child, he thinks. She was just a child.

  Sigrud opens his eyes, terrified. The dream is gone, and he thinks he’s awake—but he’s not sure. He’s wrapped in blankets and lying on something wooden. There’s a fire beside him and the moon in the distance, huge and bright. And standing over him is…

  Someone familiar. Someone small, skinny, with slumping shoulders, their thick glasses flickering in the firelight.

  “Shara?” Sigrud whispers. “Are you there?”

  He sleeps.

  He feels air moving out of his open mouth. His tongue is dry, his head aching, and his back feels scored for some reason he can’t fathom. But he’s alive.

  He cracks open his eye. He appears to be lying on the porch of Restroyka’s ranch house. It’s night now, and he’s wrapped in a pile of woolen blankets, and there’s a fire in some kind of stone chimney next to him, built up to a roaring height. He can feel the heat, but just barely.

  The fragments of his dream are still flittering through his head. He tries to look around. There’s someone in a chair beside him, looking out at the stark hills, a rifling in her hand. She hears him move and turns to look at him. It’s Restroyka.

  “Awake,” she says. “Are you thirsty?”

  Sigrud nods. It feels like he hasn’t had a drink in years.

  Restroyka rises and goes inside, rifling slung over her shoulder. She brings back a wooden cup, brimming with ice-cold water. He slurps it down greedily, but chokes on it, which makes him cough violently.

  Restroyka watches him closely, her thin, hard face still and inscrutable. “What happened to you?”

  Sigrud considers telling her that he was injured and poisoned after struggling with a near-Divinity, but decides such a claim would not be the best way to start off their relationship.

  “What do you know?” he asks, though his voice can’t rise above a whisper.

  “I know you broke onto my property, unannounced,” says Restroyka. “And I know you look like you’re dying. Though I haven’t dug the grave quite yet. I apologize if your back hurts. You were too heavy for me to carry, so I had Nina drag you up to the porch.”

  “N-Nina?”

  “My mule. Getting you into the house was impossible. So we improvised,” she says, waving to the fire. She looks at him, and he sees a hardness to her gaze he didn’t expect. “I remember you, you know.”

  “What?”

  “From the party. In Bulikov.” She sits back down. “I don’t forget a social acquaintance. There was you, with your big red coat and your hat and your pipe. And then there was her. Little Shara. And the second Vo saw her, I…” A bitter smile. “I felt the world falling apart. Even before the Battle of Bulikov.” She looks back at him, her eyes flicking over his face. “You—you’ve held up marvelously well, haven’t you? You look almost exactly as I recall you. Except not quite as alive, of course. That can’t be right, can it? I must be misremembering how you looked….”

  Sigrud watches her as she talks. She keeps one hand on her rifling at all times. There’s an easy familiarity to how she holds it that suggests this weapon might be her constant companion out here—if not her only companion.

  He tries to take a breath to ask about Tatyana, but his side hurts too much. “Don’t bother talking,” says Restroyka. “You’ve slept all day, and it looks like you needed it. Someone has worked you over like a cheap piece of mutton, and you still seem terribly sick. But you won’t find any more harm coming from me. Shara told me to check the eye, and the hand. She said you might come. And you are who she said you’d be.” She taps her left eye. “I like the false eye, though. It’s very pretty.”

  She and Sigrud look at each other for a moment, his breath shallow and ragged.

  “Did anyone follow you?” she asks quietly.

  He shakes his head.

  “Are we in danger?”

  He nods.

  “But is our location known?”

  Sigrud tries to shrug, but he’s not sure if she can see it.

  “I told her it wouldn’t last,” says Restroyka to herself. “I told her these things always fall apart….”

  There’s a clunk from down the porch. Sigrud can’t lift his head to see, but Restroyka sits up, alarmed. “Dear, I thought I told you to go back in and stay in the house!”

  “You also told me to fetch another cord of wood,” says a voice, low and sullen. “Those are two contradictory orders, Auntie.”

  Sigrud frowns. Auntie?

  “I don’t like you being out of the house,” says Restroyka. “If someone skulking around in the trees out there took some potshot at you and got lucky, I’d never forgive myself!”

  “Unless the sheep have rebelled and taken up sharpshooting, I suspect we’re quite safe here.”

  Someone steps into view, though they’re still in the shadows. Someone small and thin, their glasses glinting in the firelight, someone familiar.

  Sigrud blinks in shock. “Sh-Shara?”

  His vision focuses more. He sees he was wrong: though this new girl carries herself like Shara, dresses like Shara, and even talks a bit like her, she’s clearly a Continental, short and pale with curly, inky black hair.

  “No,” she says quietly. “Not Shara.” She looks at Restroyka. “Why does he keep saying that?”

  Then the girl draws closer, toward the light, and he sees her fully. He sees her wide, pale face, her upturned nose, her small, thin-lipped mouth.

  It’s a face he recognizes instantly. Not from the photograph he saw in Shara’s house, though, not the laughing six-year-old girl he saw there.

  It’s the girl from the slaughterhouse, he thinks, astonished. The one who saved me. She looks exactly like her! But…that’s impossible….

  “I suppose I should ask you to introduce yourself, Tatyana,” says Restroyka, rising to stand beside her. “But then, I never properly introduced myself to our guest either.”

  “We’ve met,” says Tatyana, her eyes a little wide with awe.

  “You have?” says Restroyka, surprised.

  “Yes. Once. I thought I dreamed it.” She stares into Sigrud’s face. “I was a little girl, and I walked into Mother’s room, and she was talking to a man in a mirror. The man was on a ship, and he was weeping. He was so sad, that man. And I never learned why.” She cocks her head. “She said it was a dream. But it was real. It was you. Wasn’t it?”

  Sigrud is still so surprised that he’s hardly listening to her. He can’t stop looking at her face, watching her every movement. He can’t believe that Tatyana Komayd, Shara’s adopted daughter, could possibly look so much like the girl from the slaughterhouse.

  He remembers Nokov, laughing at him in the dark: But have you seen her?

  Sigrud swallows. “How are you…How are you…”

  “How am I what?” Tatyana asks.

  His strength fails. He lets his head fall back, and he blinks once, twice, then a third time. He can’t keep awake any longer. Consciousness slips out of his grasp, and he sleeps.

  He awakens to the smell of something cooking, something thick and starchy. It’s not something he would ordinarily find appetizing, yet his stomach feels so totally empty that it growls at the merest whiff of it. He realiz
es he hasn’t felt hungry in hours, if not days—which means he must be getting better.

  He opens his eye. It’s morning, and he’s still on the porch. There’s an awful taste in his mouth, and everything feels moist. He realizes he’s been sweating pints and gallons all night.

  And sweat means…that I feel warm.

  And he does feel warm, he finds. He feels very, very warm. He needs to get these blankets off of him, and now.

  He shoves them off, which releases a cloud of saline stench that’s almost overpowering. His left side is still in terrible pain, but his skin delights in the feel of the cold morning air.

  Slowly, slowly, he stands. His sweat-drenched clothes steam slightly in the cold air, as if his pockets were full of candles. He limps to the front door of the ranch house.

  He looks inside. Everything is quite rudimentary, all candles and torches and spindly wooden chairs, not at all the trappings of a millionaire. He can smell a wood fire somewhere, and the creamy, starchy smell is stronger. He limps down the hallway.

  The hallway ends in the kitchen. There’s a small kitchen stove in the corner with a little wood fire flickering below an iron cauldron. A thread of steam unscrolls from the edge of the cauldron, where something white and lumpy has calcified.

  “It’s porridge,” says a voice.

  He turns and sees Tatyana Komayd sitting in the corner, reading a tremendous book whose spine says: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CONTINENTAL COPPER INDUSTRY. She peers over the top with an expression of measured disdain, as if remembering some personal slight he did to her.

  “Oh,” says Sigrud. He scratches his arm, feeling awkward. “Is it.”

  “Yes. It is. It’s all Auntie Ivanya eats. That and mutton, and carrots, and potatoes.”

  For a moment they just look at each other. Sigrud can’t stop looking at her arms, her legs, her feet, as if to verify that every visible piece of her is human and normal—which they all seem to be.

  She is just a girl. Just a teenage girl, watching him with an air of resentment. It’s so surreal to think that this is who he risked his life to save, who he fretted over in the dark, the person who vexed and concerned him as he sailed across the South Seas to Ghaladesh.